Full-Text Articles in Religion

Justification And Ways Of Believing, Heimir Geirsson

Heimir Geirsson

One of the issues that has been hotly discussed in connection with the direct designation theory is whether or not coreferential names can be substituted salvaveritate in epistemic contexts. Some direct designation theorists believe that they can be so substituted. Some direct designation theorists and all Fregeans and neo-Fregeans believe that they cannot be so substituted. Fregeans of various stripes have used their intuition against free substitution to argue against the direct designation theory. Some direct designation theorists have used the same intuitions to argue against the view that belief reports of simple declarative sentences can be accounted for ...

Anton Matytsin

Rhetoric Of Labelling, Hatred, Oppression, Jon P. Radwan

Jon P. Radwan

SHU MLK Day 2019 Symposium -- presentation on the Rhetoric of Labeling, Hatred, and Oppression. Lessons from Kenneth Burke, Carl Rogers, Dorothy Day, Pope Francis, and MLK are used to explain oppression and how to communicate in response.

Jon P. Radwan

This essay highlights the intersubjective dimension of ethics, aligning Lonergan’s cognitive pursuit of objective truth with a Platonic and Christian understanding of communication as interpersonal love. After an introduction to Lonergan’s epistemology, Plato’s description of rhetoric as love directs attention to how meaning and our fellow subjects help constitute our subjectivity. Critical thought advances toward truth via language and symbolism, and this mediation process ontologically grounds individual subjects within tradition and community. Just as there is an inherent ethic within knowing, so is there a self-justifying communication ethic uniting objective truth with community bonding. In St. Paul ...

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

The Problem Of Evil And The Grammar Of Goodness, Eric Wiland

Eric Wiland

I consider the two venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Both presume that it is coherent to predicate goodness (or greatness) of God. But if Peter Geach’s claim that goodness is logically attributive is cogent, then both arguments fall to the ...

The Nature Of Nature: Concerning The Efficacy Of Natural Law Reasoning

Thomas V. Gourlay

Recourse to natural law reasoning has long been a part of how Catholics and Christians engage in debates about issues of public and private morality with people and communities of people who do not share the Catholic/Christian faith. But with the rise of modernity, the scientific revolution, and the relative success of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, many Catholics have begun to question traditional natural law reasoning. Some, including theorists like Germain Grisez, and John Finnis have sought to modify traditional natural law reasoning and continue to employ it within debates concerning public and private ethics, while others ...

Samuel James Smith

Though known primarily as a Christian theologian, philosopher, and apologist, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) has also greatly influenced the field of education through his existential notions of subjective knowledge, student choice, and an emphasis on the individual as thinker and believer. At first, educators may find it a challenge to understand the complexities of his writings, but once they take the “leap,” they may discover that his approach to learning serves to inspire their practice. They may not be familiar with his name, but educators will recognize Kierkegaard’s ideas as having influenced educational theory and practice throughout the past century ...

The Matter With Pantheism: On Shepherds And Goat-Gods And Mountains And Monsters, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Lost Expectations: On Derrida's Abraham, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

This chapter undertakes a critical analysis of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) in The Gift of Death (Donner la mort). In a gesture that might be called a faithful betrayal, Derrida seeks in this text to “go further” than de Silentio, pushing Abraham’s singular near-sacrifice of Isaac into “the most common” experience of decision, his absolute relation to the Absolute into every relation to any other. Composed largely of anonymous fragments, the essay at hand evaluates the theo-ethico-political stakes of this deconstruction, seeking to re-read Derrida’s tout autre in light of the ...

Transcendence Of Trauma.Pdf, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Can One Love The Distant Other? Empathy, Affiliation, And Cosmopolitanism, Gregory R. Peterson

Gregory Peterson

An ongoing debate in political and moral philosophy concerns the nature of international obligations. While cosmopolitans argue that duties of justice are independent of national borders, statists argue otherwise, sometimes basing their account on the limitations of our empathic concern, a line of argument found much earlier in Adam Smith. Although critics argue that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality, and although statists imply that psychological limitations of the kind that would be based in empathy prevent the realization of commitments to distant others beyond humanitarian aid, I argue that both these views are incorrect. While the possession ...

Hans Urs Von Balthasar: A Primer, Thomas V. Gourlay 402884

Thomas V. Gourlay

The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan

Stuart Glennan

The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of the ...

Daredevil: Legal (And Moral?) Vigilante, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

In 1964, the comic world was introduced to its first physically disabled practicing attorney: Matt Murdock. Initially a proud graduate of "State College" and later more impressively pedigreed as a graduate of either Columbia or Harvard Law, Murdock supplemented his day job as attorney with a side of vigilante justice as Daredevil.

In 2003, Murdock became the only attorney superhero to appear as the title character in a movie. A truly awful movie, yes, but a movie all the same. And then in 2015, thanks to the talents of Drew Goddard, Murdock became the star of a terrific television series ...

God And Eternal Boredom, Attila Tanyi, Vuko Andric

Attila Tanyi

God is thought to be eternal. Does this mean that he is timeless? Or is he, rather, omnitemporal? In this paper we want to show that God cannot be omnitemporal. Our starting point, which we take from Bernard Williams’ article on the Makropulos Case, is the intuition that it is inappropriate for persons not to become bored after a sufficiently long sequence of time has passed. If God were omnitemporal, he would suffer from boredom. But God is the greatest possible being and therefore cannot be bored. God, hence, is not omnitemporal. After the presentation of our argument, we address ...

Open-Mindedness As A Christian Virtue?, Jason Baehr

Jason Baehr

Contested Moralities: Animals And Moral Value In The Dear/Symanski Debate, William S. Lynn

William S. Lynn, PhD

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of ...

William L. Portier

During the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of adult Americans were married. A recent analysis of U.S. census data reported that only 52 percent of adult Americans were married in 2009. That is the lowest percentage reported in the 100 years the Census Bureau has collected such information. The reasons for this dramatic cultural shift are well known: high rates of divorce; changing attitudes toward premarital sex; social acceptability of cohabitation; the weakening of the stigma surrounding out-of-wedlock births and single parenting; the postponement of marriage and children for academic or professional reasons.

Here Come The Nones! Pluralism And Evangelization After Denominationalism And Americanism, William L. Portier

William L. Portier

This essay begins with a four-part overview of American Catholic history focused on the building and dissolution of an immigrant Catholic subculture. The final period, “Catholics and the Dynamics of Pluralism (1968-present)” leads naturally into a discussion of the demography of Catholics in the United States. Particular attention is given to the trend to disaffiliation among millennials and how best to interpret it. Pastoral and theological reflections on the demography of disaffiliation emphasize the need for the church in the United States to take on an evangelical form more suited to a pluralism that is post-denominational and post-Americanist, and how ...

Monotheism, James F. Mcgrath

James F. McGrath

Towards A New Mysticism By Ursula King, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

"Toward a New Mysticism is, in sum, a chronologically-oriented study of the development of Teilhard's new and evolutionist mysticism, with special attention given to surmises about the roles which Teilhard's years in the East and his readings in Asian philosophy and religion played in that development." ~ from the article

The Chun-Tzu, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

The question of personal immortality-life after death-has haunted us ever since human beings realized a basic fact of existence: everything that lives is going to die. Filippo Liverziani considers evidence for life after death; from the out-of-body journeys of mystics to the near-death experiences of ordinary people who reached the threshhold of the other side and returned to tell the tale. Compelling reading for anyone who has asked that timeless question: What happens when I die?

Mysticism, Enlightenment, And Morality, Philip Novak

Philip Novak

"Our outspoken anthropologist friend, Dr. A. Bharati, once remarked that if someone is a stinker before a mystical experience, he'll be a stinker afterwards .1 The swami's observation stemmed from years spent among the holy men of India and , no doubt, from considerable personal experience. It is an exaggeration , of course, but we cannot dismiss his crucial point: it is quite possible to be a mystic and a stinker. If we refuse to take Bharati's word for it, we need only to examine the numerous recent accounts of the oafish behavior displayed by acclaimed mystic-teachers. Or we ...

Meghan Henning

The Question of the “Parting of the Ways” between Jews and Christians has become a matter of debate again: is it really appropriate to speak about two more or less coherent groups going two different ways from a certain point in history – perhaps after Paul’s mission, after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), or after the Bar-Kokhba War (132-135 CE)? Does the image of a tree with one root and two different trunks going into two different directions really fit what the extant sources tell us about the complexities of the past? Or shouldn’t we distinguish ...

Eternal Punishment As Paideia: The Ekphrasis Of Hell In The Apocalypse Of Peter And The Apocalypse Of Paul, Meghan Henning

Meghan Henning

Much of the history of scholarship on “hell” has been devoted to tracing genetic relationships between older texts and more recent ones, typically based upon generic elements or the specific features of hell’s landscape. This paper suggests a new direction for classics and New Testament study, focusing instead on the rhetorical function of hell in antiquity. This paper argues that the ancient conventions of descriptive rhetoric were at work in the depictions of Hell that we find in the Jewish and early Christian apocalypses. It begins with a definition of these rhetorical devices by examining the Progymnasmata as well ...